From Natural, I noted down this question:
Is performing being “natural” and “normal” in a society a personal choice or a survival instinct?

Rainer Hofmann

28/10/12

Mediated

1. There is not art which is not mediated.
2. Maybe the problem of theatre is that it does not imprint itself in the brain 24 times per second.
3. The medium not only determines the form, but provides (historical) context.
4. A stat

Spela Trost (Via Negativa)

28/10/12

Mediated

Art is always mediated through a different artistic form and language.
Unmediated presence essentially rejects the simulacrum, does not create the structure of the imaginary, and does not present. It is the presence that manifests itself in the activities of the body. The presence of the body does not create the production of reality, but is reality itself.

Is unmediated presence possible in the art?

Pure presence is possible only as Artaud’s body without organs.

Prevalent today is an elusive, dispersed, dis-incarnated and intangible presence.

In the present times it seems that the presence of an organic body is superfluous and that it can be replaced by technology. Technological realisations of reality in digital, virtual and cybernetic worlds replace the carnal bodily presence with databases, records, diagrams… Technological systems turning the body into a mass of artificial data maintain and further intensify the contemporary trauma of the relationship between the natural and the artificial body.

As the contemporary presence is not subject to physiological limitations of form, space and time, it breaks down the borders between the real and the fictitious.

The result of numerous technological treatments is the hyper production of simulacra and the omnipresent spectacle of the technologically accomplished form.

How to perform presence today?

Presence is the now of the performative event. It is a collective real time experience in real space, connecting performer and viewer. Presence is the reality of the body in the real time and space of the occurring text. Presence as essence, as irrevocable urgency, is specific, autonomous, exclusive. It is the presence that distinguishes performance art from other art practices. The performative event exposes the presence of the body, reveals it, and places it front and centre. Presence as absence presented because it leads inexorably to action, an artistic event in which performance art becomes the art of the process and not the end result. It is a mediated presence.

- Construction is also a fabrication, perhaps in some way a false ordering of disparate elements. It is a negative process.

- The process of time effects construction. Is construction passive or active? Construction is dynamic in the way it can change the past, present and future.

- Is construction in opposition to spontaneity and improvisation? Within the sphere of classical music improvisation is not seen as composition. Can we say the same thing about construction? No, because even spontaneous actions are constructed in some sense.

- We are a construction so we aren’t free. But is construction still about choice?

- The role of construction is to create order. In this way it inhibits freedom.

- Guy Debord – The Situationists wanted to use art to change the social constructions which trap us. Is art able to free us for construction?

- Valie Export – ‘The female body is a construction’. Construction is a form of manipulation.

- Yet nature is a construction. Construction is involved in the very building blocks of nature. Or is this just the order/construction we place on nature? Is it our form of understanding/creating order?